28 Primary Auditory Cortical Responses while Attending to Different Streams

Auditory streaming is a fundamental perceptual component of auditory scene analysis. It manifests itself in the everyday ability of humans and animals to parse complex acoustic information arising from multiple sound sources into meaningful auditory “streams”. While seemingly effortless, the neural mechanisms underlying auditory streaming remain a mystery largely because experiments in non-human species has been hampered by the difficulty of assessing the subjective perception of streaming without relying on introspection and language. Here we overcome this difficulty through the use of specially designed stimuli and psychoacoustic tasks to induce, manipulate, and at the same time objectively assess streaming in animals. While the basic structure of the stimuli and tasks are identical to those used with humans in Micheyl, Oxenham, and Shamma (this volume) they are slightly adapted so that physiological data can be collected simultaneously with behavior in animals.